Judge Napolitano: Woodrow Wilson ‘was awesome the way Hitler was’

Jamie Weinstein

Jamie Weinstein is Senior Editor of The Daily Caller. His work has appeared in The Weekly Standard, the New York Daily News and The Washington Examiner, among many other publications. He also worked as the Collegiate Network Journalism Fellow at Roll Call Newspaper and is the winner of the 2011 "Funniest Celebrity in Washington" contest. A regular on Fox News and other cable news outlets, Weinstein received a master’s degree in the history of international relations from the London School of Economics in 2009 and a bachelor's degree in history and government from Cornell University in 2006. He is the author of the political satire, "The Lizard King: The Shocking Inside Account of Obama's True Intergalactic Ambitions by an Anonymous White House Staffer."

Asked whether there was anything about Wilson that he admired, Napolitano compared Wilson to the 20th century’s most notorious killer.

“He was awesome the way Hitler was,” Napolitano said.

“He succeeded in persuading vast numbers of people that they had consented to his destruction of their freedoms; and they believed him; and he destroyed the freedoms of many of them. He interpreted the First Amendment, which prohibits ‘Congress’ from infringing upon the freedom of speech, to permit the so-called Department of Justice to do the infringing.”

At this point, it is probably worth noting that whatever his faults, Wilson did not attempt the mass extermination of a particular people. It’s possible that some may see that as a significant difference between the two.

As for Theodore Roosevelt, whom many Americans idealize for his adventurous spirit, if not his progressive politics, Napolitano said he didn’t see much to admire about him either.

“He was a domineering thug who beat Irish immigrants with clubs for the crime of being drunk when he was Commissioner of police in New York City, who believed he was above the law, and who enjoyed killing people,” he said. “What is there to love about that?”

Well, at least Teddy avoided being compared to Hitler.

See The Daily Caller’s full interview with Napolitano below about his new book:

Why did you decide to write the book?

The roots of our big government ills today were planted in the Progressive Era.

How did Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, in your opinion, help destroy constitutional freedoms?

Both TR and Wilson did not believe that the Constitution meant what is says. They rejected the plain meaning, common understanding, and at the time of its creation universally-accepted premise that the federal government was one of limited powers. From Washington to McKinley (with the exception of the Civil War and Reconstruction), the federal government basically understood that it could only do what it was affirmatively authorized to do by the Constitution. The Progressives inverted that value and argued that the federal government could do whatever it chose to do unless that choice was affirmatively prohibited by the Constitution.